Tuesday, March 27, 2007

As I was going through the manuscript again, I can't help but start to think about characters, recurring ones. While I'd probably never describe myself as a narrative poet in any conventional sense, I do use narrative to my own evil devices, usually over the course of multiple poems rather just in one. It's probably those one-time desires to write fiction, to be a novelist. While poetry was the first love in writing-wise, fiction was always the first love reading-wise. And it was tough, after trying to do both well and really doing both rather badly to choose one over the other if I ever hoped to be good at either. Some writers balance these marvelously. Me, I need to focus or it all falls apart. So, for the last seven years or so, it's been all poetry, all the time. Which doesn't necessarily mean I've given up my narrative tendencies, they just manifest themselves in interesting ways. The first section of this mss., which was mostly written in the last 12 months or so, the people in it, the story arc, are surely those same girls that appear in the paper house(2005)--actually that poem was one of the ones that went back and forth between books and wound up in the bird museum. Of course what else is there for girls who burned down their house in a rage supposed to do but become carnies? Hell, they even sort of resemble the sisters from the last of the summer poems (2002)in the fever almanac. And I know there are more little obsessions, people who pop up in other books or chaps and resurface again, even as peripheral characters. I like it, sort of like my own little Kevin Smith universe (er..except less dirty and foul-mouthed...er..well most of the time..)